The present invention relates to techniques for providing interoperability between and among disparate entities, applications and services in a network environment. More specifically, embodiments of the invention provide techniques which provide on-demand access to different combinations of applications and/or services in such a network environment.
Corporate reliance on technology has become more complex and pervasive. Increasingly, companies are identifying opportunities to extend their core business or cut costs using the Internet. Both trends have put increasing priority on integrating the operation of disparate business applications that exist in different enterprises. As a result, the enterprise application integration (EAI) and business-to-business B2B industries have emerged to provide solutions for unifying enterprise legacy systems that may span corporate boundaries and may include the applications of business partners and customers. Ideally, this unification does not require sweeping changes to the underlying applications and data structures.
EAI and B2B solution providers typically offer end point solutions for managing business process interactions between end points. This can take place within an enterprise on a local network or, in the case of B2B, across the Internet. Although a specific enterprise software package may be designed to transparently handle diverse business processes carried out by two or more end nodes, each specific enterprise software package requires releasing, implementing or building customized connectors or adapters to connect to different legacy systems which will work for the specific business processes and applications used by the specific end nodes. As a result, these enterprise solutions are not easily scalable. Additionally, scores of connectors are needed for each vendor (e.g., Oracle, SAP and Peoplesoft). As each supplier releases new versions of their software, EAI and B2B vendors find themselves unable to gain traction under the burden of supporting existing connecters.
Notwithstanding the benefits of EAI and B2B solutions, the software costs and resource investments required often prevent small-to-medium enterprise (SME) customers from embracing EAI and B2B solutions. For SMEs, reliance on web services technology providers represents an increasingly attractive alternative.
The application service provider (ASP) market is one of the fastest growing segments of the software industry. ASPs make enterprise applications (e.g., human resources administration, recruiting, travel and expense management, sales force automation) available to customers over the web on a subscription basis. These applications are fully managed and hosted by the provider providing significant cost savings to enterprises and eliminating many of the issues requiring EAI solutions.
Some ASPs merely host and manage third-party packaged software for their customers (i.e., “managed hosters”). Others build new applications from the ground up to take advantage of the benefits and cost-savings of the ASP model. ASPs enjoy the profit margins and operational scalability of consumer Web companies like eBay and Yahoo, while at the same time offering the feature sets of complex enterprise software applications such as PeopleSoft and Siebel.
Although the ASP approach allows a business and its partners to use third party or custom applications, this approach does not allow the configuring and dismantling of complex arrangements between business partners. Specifically, the ASP approach requires custom configurations when business partners use different data formats for their messages or different communications protocols. Using these custom configurations, business partners specify the format of outgoing messages to comport with the recipient's format requirements. These messages can then be delivered to a recipient in a format understandable to the recipient. According to this approach, business entities must keep track of formatting and integration requirements of each of their recipient business partners in order to achieve interoperability. This can be costly and time-consuming.
None of these ad hoc approaches to interoperability can practically provide a single solution for facilitating the consumption of the wide array of disparate services employed by the typical enterprise. Moreover, none of these approaches is well suited to deliver such an array of services in the personalized manner to which so many users of the World Wide Web have become accustomed.
In view of the above, there is a need for facilitating communications between and among diverse business entities, processes, and services in a scalable manner.